Sunday 7 June 2009

Time travel

Time travel would erase the distinction between past, present and future, just as the advances in global travel have erased distance and cultural specificity. It would result in a kind of temporal globalisation: the commodification of the hours and minutes, the homogeneity of memory, hope and perception. Everybody would use the time machines of course; would employ them for work and for leisure, to the extent that people could no longer imagine what life would be like without them (and, forcefully, they could not be uninvented); and at the same time people would feel elegaic twinges that life was somehow better before they came along.

3 comments:

Piers said...

Yes, eventually. In the meantime there'd be class distinctions--people who could only use it on business, those who could only go into the past or future the old way, the time-travel set.

Adam Roberts Project said...

One of the arguments sometimes advanced for the impossibility of time travel is: 'if anybody were ever to invent it, then we'd know about it, because visitors would have come to us from the future.' But perhaps we're all currently living in the temporal equivalent of a wildlife preserve, an artificially maintained bubble built around us to create a sort of zoo-diversity in an otherwise wholly homogenised timescape.

Mahendra Singh said...

I have to disagree with Piers; time travel will at last overthrow the class-and-time-based temporal bourgeoisie and usher in the monochronic egalitarianism of a truly timeless proletariat!

The Now is now and the Past will be also and the Future was already!